Our Next Engineering Milestone

Back in January we released the Beta and updated you on our overall engineering process that will get us from Beta to the Release Candidate. Today, downloading of the Release Candidate started and we’re already seeing a lot of installations and a lot of excitement. On behalf of the team, I want to extend a thank you for all of the millions of people who have been running and testing the Beta who have helped to make the Release Candidate possible. The feedback we have received, through all the mechanisms we have blogged about, has been an incredibly valuable part of Engineering Windows 7. We continue to be humbled by the response to Windows 7. Thank you!

This post is about the path from RC to what we call RTM, release to manufacturing. RTM is not one point in time but a “process” as from RTM we enable the PC manufacturers to begin their processes of building Windows 7 images for new PCs, readying downloads for existing machines, and preparing the full supply chain to deliver Windows 7 to customers. Thus RTM is the final stage in our engineering of Windows 7, but the engineering continues from RTM until you can purchase Windows 7 and Windows 7 PCs in stores at General Availability, or GA.

The path to RTM starts with downloads of the RC. The RC is “done” and what we are doing is validating this against the breadth of the ecosystem and with partners. It means, from our perspective, we have run many tests many times and are working to understand the quality of the release in a breadth sense. We’re all familiar with this as we have done this same thing as we went from pre-Beta to Beta and from Beta to RC. The primary difference with the RC is that we will not be changing the functionality or features of the product at this point—that’s the sort of thing we’ll save for a future release. We’ve gotten tons of feedback on design and features and shown how we have digested and acted on this feedback throughout many posts on this blog. We know we did not do everything that was asked, and we have also seen that we’ve been asked to do things that are tricky to reconcile. We hoped through the dialog on this blog that we’ve shown our commitment to listening and balancing a wide variety of inputs, and how we have thought about the evolution of Windows.

What sort of feedback are we looking for in the RC? We are primarily focused on monitoring the behavior of the product through the telemetry, and of course making sure we did not introduce any regressions in any dimension from Beta quality. One of the things we have done since Beta has continued to beef up telemetry—we’ve put in additional monitoring points in many systems. We’re particularly interested in seeing what devices are installed, drivers that are required, and overall system performance. We have telemetry points that monitor the UI responsiveness of the Start Menu, Internet Explorer (recently posted), Boot, Shutdown, Resume, and across all subsystems. Of course in the final product, this telemetry is optional and opt-in, and it is always private.

There are a series of specific types of reports that we are keeping an eye out for that would constitute changes we would make to the code between now and RTM. Some of these might include:

Installation – We have significant telemetry in the setup process and also significant logging. Of course if you can’t set up at all that is something we are interested in and the same holds for upgrades from Windows Vista. For the “enrolled” beta programs we have a mechanism to enlist a connection to Microsoft for these issues and for the broad community the public support groups are monitored.

Security issues – Obviously any vulnerability is a potential for something we would fix. We will use the same criteria to address these issues as we would for any in-market product.

Crashes and Hangs – We are monitoring the “crash” reports for issues that arise that impact broad sets of people. These could be Windows code, drivers, or third party software. This information streams “real time” to Microsoft and we watch it very carefully.

Device installation and compatibility – When you download a driver from Windows Update or install a driver via a manufacturer’s setup program this is a data point we collect. We’ve had millions of unique PnP IDs through the Beta. We also receive the IDs for devices that failed to locate drivers. We are constantly updating this web service with pointers to information about the device (driver availability, instructions, etc.)

Software installation – Similar to devices, we are also monitoring the installation process of software and noting programs that do not complete successfully. Again we have the mechanism to help move that foreword and/or introduce compatibility work in the RTM milestone.

Servicing – We will continue to test the servicing of Windows 7 so everyone should expect updates to be made available via Windows Update. This includes new drivers and will also include patches to Windows 7. Test Updates will be labeled as such. We might also fix any significant issue with new code as well. All of this in an effort to validate the servicing pipeline and to maintain the quality of the RC.

New Hardware – Perhaps the most important category is making sure that we work with all the new hardware being made as we all use 7100. Our PC Manufacturing partners and Hardware partners are engineering new PCs and these are combinations new to the market and new to the OS. We’re working together to make sure Windows 7 has great support for these PCs and hardware.

All of the feedback will be evaluated and whether the issue is with Windows itself or with hardware, software, or OEM partner code we will work closely across the entire ecosystem to do what is necessary to deliver excellent fully integrated PCs. This goal is more important than anything else at this point. The depth of this work is new for the team in terms of spending engineer to engineer time across a broad range of partners to make sure everyone is ready together to deliver a great PC experience.

Overall, while many have said that the quality of the Beta was on par with past RCs (remember how some even suggested we release it as final!), we are working to do an even better job with Windows 7. We think we have the tools in place to do that.

While the RC itself was compiled about 2 weeks ago, it takes a bit of time to go through the mechanics of validating all the ISOs and images that are released. In the meantime we continue doing daily builds of the product. The daily builds are incorporating code changes to address the above types of issues that impact enough customers that on balance the code change is more valuable than the potential of a regression. Throughout this process, every change to the code is looked at by many people across development and test, and across many different teams. We have a lot of engineers changing a very little bit of code. We often say that shipping a major product means “slowing everything down”. Right now we’re being very deliberate with every change we make.

The RTM milestone is not a date, but a process. As that process concludes, we are done changing the code and are officially “servicing” Windows 7. That means any subsequent changes are delivered as fixes (KB articles) or banked for the first service pack. Obviously our ability to deliver fixes via Windows Update has substantially changed the way we RTM and so it is not unreasonable to expect updates soon after the product is complete as we have done for both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Between now and the RTM milestone we will make changes to the code in response the above inputs. We are decelerating and will do so “gracefully” and not abruptly. We do not have a “deadline” we are aiming to meet and the quality (in all dimensions) of the product and a smooth finish are the most important criteria for Windows 7. In addition, we have a lot of work going on behind the scenes to build Windows 7 in nearly 100 languages around the world and to make sure all the supporting materials such as our Windows web site, SDK, resource kits, and so on are ready and available in a timely manner.

Once we have entered the RTM phase, our partners will begin to make their final images and manufacture PCs, and hardware and software vendors will ready their Windows 7 support and new products. We will also begin to manufacture retail boxes for shipment around the world. We will continue to work with our enterprise customers as well and based on the RTM process the volume license products will be available as well.

Delivering the highest quality Windows 7 is the most important criteria for us at this point—quality in every dimension. The RTM process is designed to be deliberate and maintain the overall engineering integrity of the system. Many are pushing us to release the product sooner rather than later, but our focus remains on a high quality release.

Ultimately our partners will determine when their PCs are available in market. If the feedback and telemetry on Windows 7 match our expectations then we will enter the final phases of the RTM process in about 3 months. If we are successful in that, then we tracking to our shared goal of having PCs with Windows 7 available this Holiday season.

I have been working with the Windows 7 beta and just recently the Windows 7 Release Candidate. One thing I did not see mentioned going into the RTM build is that of working on increasing the performance of the Windows 7 with the RTM build. Are we to assume that the RC performance is what we will expect on the RTM build?

I am very excited for the Windows 7 GA and hope you continue to make great strides with this OS.

I have a CanoScan 5600f scanner and if I leave it on and plugged in (via USB) when Windows 7 RC goes into sleep mode I cannot come back out of sleep mode. If I turn it off and go into sleep mode the computer will wake as expected.

Congratulations to all members of Win7 team! The OS feels really snappy and stable, and I hope the RTM is to become a great success. It also would be appreciated if you could enlarge the experience given by the Microsoft Connect website as I think that the best products are made when all parties concerned are present and can throw in their ideas.

Regards,

Chris

BTW, I have some restore from hibernation problems that I haven’t had with Beta and Pre-Beta, but I suppose telemetry has already notified you of that 🙂

Steven it looks promising but, as per http://www.pretentiousname.com/misc/win7_uac_whitelist2.html, has UAC security actually been fixed? I mean if there is a whitelist of trusted apps and arbitrary code can elevate, why even have non-admin vs admin accounts? Why waste every developer and users time?

I am running Windows 7 RC, and unfortunately it doesn’t fix the problems that occurred with the beta. In the Beta release I could not hibernate with more than a couple of applications open. It would simply blue screen rather than turning off. I’m quite concerned that this problem still exists in the release candidate.

During the beta I was just putting my machine into sleep overnight. Unfortunately in the release candidate, restoring from sleep simply reboots the machine.

I’m sure you’re receiving telemetry data about this but it is of grave concern to me that so close to release such major problem still exists.

It’s not clear to me if fixes for this sort of problem will be delivered via Windows update before the release candidate goes to manufacturing, so that we can confirm the problem would exist with the released product.

Is this website a hoax, or is this a legitimate problem with UAC? I think this is much worse than the older problem in the beta where UAC setting could be changed via a script that emulated keystrokes. Based on what the author wrote it sounds like this flaw would completely eliminate the value of having applications prompt for elevation, since malware could avoid the prompts.

I would be very interested to see a blog post refuting this claim if it does not actually pose a risk. In the meantime I have changed my UAC settings to the highest level just like Vista.

When I’m moving the taskbar from left to top, to right, sometimes there’ is left with a blurry artifact on previous docked position. To remove this, I have to drag the taskbar back down to the bottom of the screen.

Another quirk which I know won’t be fixable in RC stages, is the progress bar in the taskbar, perhaps in the future releases, you can make that progress bar target the total progress for all instances of the applications, and have the hover over menu/thumbnails display the individual progress bar’s showing individual progress state.

I really like the hover state of the start button, but the Windows flag image seems to differ to the the normal start button state, perhaps making that image on the default button state as well?

I’ve also noticed, for the new login screen design, the Shutdown, Restarting text, which has a drop shadow on it, seems to be a bit strange, I think the new blue-bird background is a little too bright maybe?

Other than that, I think this is one of the most stable releases of Windows I’ve ever used.

Just an issue that I and at least one other Acer Aspire One user has experienced: When booting, boot fails, Windows 7 initiates startup repair, but cannot repair. I had to reinstall again. The other user, who’s forum entry I read had performed a hard reset by holding down the power button (as I seem to recall I may have done too). Obviously that’s not a great way to shutdown a system, but I guess in both our cases, the system had locked up and it was the only way out. Not too bad for me, on a machine I use for playing with, but if it had been my main machine it would have been extremely annoying. I can try to replicate the problem if you’d like.

Other than that, it looks great. The AAO flies, much quicker than the beta.

hi. there is only one thing that i found lacking in win7. the biometric devices support still does not work. the correct drivers are installed automatically but when you try to register a fingerprint, the application crashes. i don’t know if it is a driver problem or a win7 problem but you may want to look into biometric support a bit.

The firsth thing I disliked about the RC was the background image of the Welcome screen/Login screen. (the one with the flower and the bird). The Beta background was much better and had a professional style.

First off, job well done! The beta process was fun and I, along with many others, provided feedback that was treated pretty fairly as the beta went along. It was apparent you guys were listening to us and responding through this blog. Were some requests deferred to never never land and some closed with easy answers like "by design"? Sure, but they were really just wish list stuff and I understand the reasons based on your explanations in this blog.

The testing I have done on the RC thus far is going great and it just feels "rock solid" to me. I have loaded it (clean) on three computers and have not found any major issues. Every single hardware device and application I normally run on a daily basis continue to work as they did on Vista or they work better. Performance overall is very good (both x86 and x64). Confidence is high. I am looking forward, with eager anticipation, for the RTM availability.

The folks on your team deserve a nice big bonus when this product gets out the door. I plan to purchase my copy at GA for sure, because if ever a program product deserved a high ROI, it’s definitely Windows 7.

I forgot to ask my main question. You stated that changes to RC will be reflected and made available to RC evaluators via Windows Update service. I have seen one of those come down already. Does that mean we should be less interested in acquiring a "leak" of the RTM builds, since important stuff will come via WU or Microsoft Update? I know hundreds of thousands of the die hard testers were getting the pre-RC builds via leaks. Not that I condon leaks per se, but they were very irresistible at the time and provided you guys some extra telemetry data. 🙂

First of all, congrats to the entire Windows 7 team on the RC. I have taken the liberty of doing a clean installation on my main destop’s second hard drive. I will use the Windows 7 RC as my primary operating system until I have a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate RTM in my hands. The clean look, the speed, the responsiveness, and overall performance is very impressive.

I was so impressed with the working version of the Release Candidate, I took the liberty of applying the Release Candidate to my notebook. I was having instabilities with Vista after the installation of I.E. 8. After uninstalls and reinstalls, it didn’t resolve those situations. So I elected to backup and save all materials, and try Windows 7 RC. To my delight, it worked like a charm. The sheer speed and responsiveness is nothing like I ever had with Vista or its default OS, Windows XP Home Edition.

Needless to say, I’m overjoyed at the quality. I had to ask myself using the Windows 7 RC, "This is a Microsoft product?" While I don’t mean to offend, the quality level here is higher than any Microsoft product I’ve ever used. You guys have definitely set the bar higher and I hope all of Microsoft strives for this new level.

I know that at the RC point, the Windows 7 team is looking for showstopper bugs. However, will there be any effort to make any last minute performance improvements? Less memory, less cpu demand, faster OS speed, faster GUI speed, better network copying, etc?

A final improvement in these areas that could be quantifiable would definitely be a nice selling point.

P.S. If Steven, Jon or somebody could clarify this. Paul Thurrott has published some pictures concerned with the packaging. Can someone clarify if these are genuine or fake boxes? Thanks.

Please please release separate editions (separate x86, x84 and IA64) of WAIK, Windows SDK and the Windows Driver Kit. Downloading IA64 bits over a slow connection when it is absolutely of no use to me is a PITA. Please at least separate IA64 since that is a niche platform.

We aren’t going to make all the change we make available over Windows Update. We are just testing things out and of course any changes that would be deemed critical in a released product will be distributed (i.e. security issues).

As we always say, please do not use what are reported to be "leaked" builds. So far many of them have contained risky payloads.

I am not sure that your testers whether told about ‘automatically cleaning System Restore points’ or not, and also I am not that in Windows 7 RC, it still have this feature or not because I did not test storing data up to near maximum of harddisk. But if it still have, I think you should remove this feature from Windows 7 RTM because, for example, many users want to use System Restore to roll back computer back to good state, but they may found that their System Restore points were removed automatically!! Thanks

I really, really hope that your marketing people are getting the message LOUD AND CLEAR that they need to give something substantial back to those of us who purchased Vista. Microsoft will seriously alienate us if it follows the usual practice of having a single upgrade price regardless of current version.

There must be a good case, given Vista’s troubled history, for a "handling charge only" upgrade from Vista to 7, but failing that, there must be Vista-only upgrade pricing which is substantially lower than upgrading from XP or earlier.

Windows 7 is shaping up great in engineering terms, but there is still an opportunity for your marketing people to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" if they are just running on autopilot here!

Please fix the sort order for Explorer before RTM. By default, it should sort in Ascending order. Currently, even if it’s Ascending order, sorting by any criteria such as size, date modified or type makes it sort by that criteria as well as reverse the order (becomes descending) when in fact the user just expected the sort criteria to change. This is a major annoyance and I request the team to fix it before RTM. There is already a Sort by Ascending/Descending menu item, why should then the sort order change by changing sort criteria? Please don’t say this behavior is by design, it’s an oversight/bug that needs to be fixed. Anyone listening?

I wonder how this product will compete headon with Windows XP which is still sitting strong at 60%+ market share.

Please, bring back the folder.jpg trick. I have thousands of folders tagged with folder.jpg’s inside so I can have a custom thumbnail.

folder.jpg is supposed to be used for creating a cover thumbnail for a folder *without* needing to go to the folder’s customize tab. This functionality has been present since Windows XP and worked correctly in build 7000 (Beta). So, it’s clearly a regression.

Great job on W7 so far, I am a lot more positive and much more inclined to recomend this than vista when that was in beta.

The only real problem that I have had installing the RC was that it did not include the Ralink RT2500 Wireless LAN drivers, this is obviously a real pain as I can manage without most drivers as long as I can get onto the inet to download them.

I know that RT2500 is old tech now but it was very popular when released so I feel that it would be worth the extra few kb to include it.

Windows 7 is almost perfect for me. You are doing a really good job with this system.

But, before the RTM, can you please, just tweak a few points in Windows Explorer?

1) In windows xp, the status bar showed the left space of the current drive/partition, and the size of the files in the current folder. Now, it doesn´t show anymore, and I (among others) miss this feature a lot.

2) If we select more than 15 files in Windows Explorer, the Details Pane stop showing the sizes and info. We have to click the "Show more details" to it be visible. Please, remove this behaviour, or give us a option (even if registry option) to disable it. XP used to give me this information in less than a millisecond, and with a decade ago hardware.

I’d love to submit this as a formal bug, but I’m not sure where to do that anymore.

In RC1 on my laptop, switching to S-Video out was a bit tricksy, but managed to work. However, on return back to my normal display, my taskbar icons were missing, though the orb/outlines were still intact. Clicking on the taskbar restores the icons, but they sometimes disappear again. A reboot, I anticipate, will solve the issue, but I tend to sleep instead of rebooting.

Otherwise, everything looks and runs fantastically.

My remaining issue:

Please, please, PLEASE allow me to view details/column headers in NON-details mode. This is something that was introduced in Vista and its disappearance is absolutely tragic. I use it everyday, specifically to quickly sort thumbnail-view folders by date modified–making those columns display only in details mode is a disservice, and I’m not sure why we’ve regressed here.

Finally, Chrome & other similar multi-threaded, similarly-titled processes tend to freak out the taskbar merging–multiple Chrome windows, including those spawned originally as "web application shortcuts" tend to group randomly to one of the three Chrome pinned items I have.

Please, give some attention to different proxy configurations for different nets. It’s a big problem for mobile users! Win Vista learned to differentiate nets somehow, but proxy settings are still the same for all nets.

Examlpe: a laptop user has a home wifi, sometimes uses wifi hotspots and has cable connection at work, that needs proxy. In this situation it’s wery annoying to switch proxy settings every time. The settings are deep in Control Panel, and some applications doesn’t seem to listen to global settings (This is another question, I think. Does global proxy settings should be unavoidable, or just recommendations. With XP’s recommendation-style global settings, a lot of services, that don’t listen to them, don’t work. I-will-never-do-manual-proxy-switch-to-ten-different-programs!).

The solution I see:

-global settings for proxy

–personal proxy settings for each net

—personal proxy settings for each program

and first two should have option to stack or to override (as an abstraction of unavoidable and recommended). In this situation if net requires a proxy as gateway to internet and browser has proxy setting for anonymity, they will make a chain and all be ok.

You’ve done a great job. I’m already used to working with Windows 7. As soon as it reaches GA, I’ll get it.

It’s unlikely to be fixed, but one small annoyance I should note is that when you click the power icon, only 2 (instead of 3) power plans are shown. It so happens to be that I use only Power Saver (at night / while on battery) and High Performance (during the day). It’s annoying that I cannot switch from Power Saver to High Performance without having to open the Power Options screen. In Vista this was a lot easier.

The native 3G (UMTS) support is great: my 3G modem (Telit MX20 USB modem) now works right away after boot-up without having to first load it’s utility (which takes 2 or 3 minutes). In XP and Vista, it won’t work without loading the utility first. Quite annoying if you’re on the road and don’t have a very large battery.

WMP has been greatly increased from the Beta version. In the Beta, WMP was quite unstable – I’m sure I’m not the only one who noticed this.

Networking features have been improved significantly. Yesterday I transferred 4 GB of files to my mother-in-law’s new PC (Vista); setting this up took seconds.

BUT WITH GREAT SORROW I MUST ADMIT , THAT PERFORMANCE AND COMPATIBILITY OF THIS RC MILESTONE IS EQUAL TO OLD BETA MILESTONE OF WINDOWS 7 !!!.

THIS AT LEAST ON MY PC.

I DO NOT WANT TO BE TO CRITICIZE, BUT TO GIVE SUGGESTIONS OF IMPROVEMENTS TO MAKE THAT THEY HAVE NOT BEEN MADE OR THEY ARE NOT VISIBLE TO EYE OF USER!!!

1) THERE IS EVER THE SAME BUG IN RC : CIRCULAR HOURGLASS REMAINS SECONDS TIME ALWAYS TOO MUCH, WHEN ALWAYS WINDOWS IT OPENED , FOR EXAMPLE A WORD DOCUMENT!!!

THIS IS TRULY BORING , AND THIS BUG IS ALSO PRESENT IN RC MILESTONE , SAME BETA MILETONE OF WINDOWS 7!!!!!

2) BOOT-TIME , SHUTDOWN-TIME AND LOD TIME OF APPLICATIONS , ARE SAME OF TIME OF OLD BETA MILESTONE , INDEED IN SOME CASES THE TIMES ARE GET WORSE , RESPECT OLD BETA MILESTONE.

3) SOME APPLICATIONS , ( IN PARTICULAR , 3D APPLICATIONS) , OF IT I CITE SOME OF THEY THAT I USE: “ LUXOLOGY MODO , MAXON CINEMA 4D XL , PHOTOSHOP CS4 ARE SLOWER IN LOADING, WITH SAME ISSUE OF CIRCULAR HOURGLASS PRESENT FOR MUCH SECONS ( 8-10 SECONDS) , UNTILE I CAN BE WORK ON WINDOW OF PROGRAMS.

IN SOME CASE , THESE 3D APPLICATIONS , NOT RESPONDING : RETURN ME ERROR “APP. IS WORKING STOPPED”……

WINDOWS 7 IT IS UNKNOWN WHAT MAKE, I DO NOT KNOW WHAT TO MAKE IN THESE MINUTES, AND I DON’T KNOW IF I MUST KILL APPLICATIONS OR TO WAIT FOR INFINITES SECONDS !!!!!!!

WELL, YOU HELP ME , WHAT I MUST MAKE IN THESE SITUATIONS !!!

WITH THESE BUGS I CANNOT WORK, IS INDEED BORING!!!!!!! IT’S TIME

FOR ME IS LOST TIME!!!!

4) IN THE END , I HOPE ALSO IN ANOTHER IMPORTANT IMPROVE OF WINDOWS 7!!!!

the real point weak person is the fragmentation of the registry of windows 7 !!!!

Same other old windows systems!!!

Improve if possible the reduction of fragmentation of windows 7 registry ,

using at beast or certified at least two applications of third parts, for the defragmentation of the registry of windows 7 64 bit , in automatic and in background and without to demand the reboot of windows 7 system !!!

for example: good are : tuneup utilities 2009 , but certified them , and say you to productor of software, of improve program in registry defragmentation , make it an algoritm with not require reboot of windows 7 64 bit, after defragmentation!!!!!!!!

Well, for now is all , I hope that all these four points , will be fix in windows 7 64 bit RTM!!!!!!

I hope but not us more to us creed, since you are nearly at the end of the development, fairies all the possible one, please, the system has still many uncertainties and after l’ intensive use stretches to slow down!!!!!

Yeah I agree with Daniel Breslauer that power plans UI is a step backwards as those who alternate between High Performance and Power saver plans are constantly forced to go to Control Panel to switch their plan. This was more intuitive in Vista, MS can add an option in Power options or Group Policy which allows users to specify which 2 plans to show or always show all 3 plans or even more, that would be really great.

So far mostly everything is great! Thank you for the work that has been put in to this OS.Amazing things are possible with it.

Sometimes it can be the little changes that are frustrating – In the Beta Mediacenter Movies Library we had the option to "watch" or "restart" a movie… In the videos, only "Play".

Now in the RC you added a "restart" to videos, and took it out of Movies which means I can’t restart a movie from the beginning any longer without rebooting my whole network!

This is an incredibly frustrating setback from the Beta for my Home Theater system and I hope there is a patch on the way to restore this important function. While you’re at it, please throw me an "eject" option when my DVD tray is empty.

Windows Explorer once again hangs when accessing network drives over slow connections. It confusingly displays the old folder while navigating to the new. To top it of, if you create a new folder, and then navigate to it by clicking "Enter", it gives the error "Folder ‘New folder’ does not exist."

Windows Libraries no longer work with network drives on Linux or Vista machines, giving an error about indexing. This makes libraries useless for me (and anyone that has at least one non-Windows7 machine? which must be everyone?) But… Windows Media Player seems to use *different* libraries, which do seem to work with network drives? I don’t get it.

Windows7 is still a big step forward from Vista. It’s just that the great beta had made me expect better. 🙂

Win7 RC has worked wonderfully, except in the one instance of running a backup. Each time I try to do it (at night) I return to the office to see the screen frozen from the night before, no mouse moving etc. Do you (how do you?) get this data?

– The window thumbnails are still too slow. They should appear immediately, not after a second.

– Why is it still not possible to put the recycle bin, folders and removable devices like usb sticks or cds directly on the superbar? It is all combined in the Explorer icon. This is a missed opportunity and I don’t know why this isn’t fixed yet. Perhaps I’m ignorant but it doesn’t sound too complex to me.

– Me personally I think the superbar looks fat and ugly. Though it is a great concept and I have also heard positive reviews about the looks of Windows 7.

– I think it is still hard to distinguish things like a running program from an inactive shortcut for example.

Microsoft are in SERIOUS danger of creating another version of the internet fuelled VISTA back-lash, if they do not address the UAC Whitelist issue, and either resolve it fully in the RTM or explain to everyone, in Clear and Unambiguous terms, why it is not a problem.

Is there a venue wherein a feature may be requested of the Windows 7 team? The feature request entails an operating-system-inherent capability to assign the left and right mouse button keys to keys on the keyboard. This feature is especially helpful to handicapped individuals who do not have the dexterity needed to press the mouse keys in the normal fashion. Presently, programs like AutoHotKey are required to achieve the needed functionality with Window XP.

A recent article I read on OSNews states that UAC is flawed in protecting you on the default setting because it allows Notepad and Calculator not to be protected by UAC. It’s a proof of concept code that would allow UAC to be turned off because of these two applications would bypass UAC. All I ask is that MS Developers to please look into this.

I’m very much hoping that Win 7 will put in a type of Work Spaces into it’s OS where it can be turned on or off at will. Have it as a separate download if needed. Sure there are similar one’s out there for windows, but none of them I either trust or enjoy.

As you guys removed the Send Feedback button from RC1 I will have to report this here. There’s a bug that is driving me nuts:

The bug is that all titlebar buttons (minimize, maximize and close) are missing in every window, as well as part of the aero border. I can still click them though they are invisible.

I running 64bit RC1 on my laptop with an external monitor.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

1) I turn on my notebook with my display already connected to it.

2) Windows 7 is starting up.

3) The previously adjusted settings makes my external display as the primary display. So I log on typing on the external display.

4) The Windows logs on to my desktop and every window gets a strange border and the titlebar buttons like minimize, maximize and close are not rendered, but I can still click them (if I guess where they are).

Hi, as one of the posters above mentioned, and has been pointed out on several Windows 7 forums for a very long time now (since the early betas), the aero animation for opening and closing a window are not smooth as they are in Vista. There is a noticeable stutter or choppiness to them. It’s mainly noticeable when opening a window.. the window fades in and then it ‘pops’ into place..almost like it’s skipping the last 25% of the animation. Maximize and minimize are fine and very smooth. Should this open/close animation be identically as smooth as it is in Vista? Or has it been changed for Windows 7? I’m ok with it if it’s been changed for W7, I just wish I could get an idea of whether it’s a bug or a feature. I much prefer how it animates in Vista. Thanks. My system:

Hi again… I just wanted to provide a couple links showing other people encountering the choppiness/hitching with the aero animations when opening/closing a window (see my post directly above). It does not seem to be driver-related. Thanks.

Great job for developing Windows 7,if you ask me make this RC1 the RTM.;)

Running the RC1 (x64) gives me great pleasure, i noticed no problems at all installing this on my Lenovo T61, said allready goodby to XP, never used Vista….(all my software is running without any problems also)

One small issue is de blinking bar over the taskbar when using firefox, not all the time btw..

I agree that the aero animations aren’t smooth. I experience that too.

and also the change from login screen to the windows desktop, or from the windows desktop to the shut down screen is not smooth, it all seems a bit uncontrolled. This is a detail though and I guess a different problem than the aero animations.

I do like how W7 handles the Sleep/hibernate cycles… shutting down the PC after a specified time period, then when you turn it back it, it goes into "Resuming Windows". I prefer this setup because it also allows me to boot into the primary OS (Ubuntu) and do what I need to, and even after restarting, W7 still goes into "Resuming Windows".

The problem I see is 2 fold:

1) When resuming from sleep/hibernation, any computer with more than 1 video output option (such as a laptop with external monitor port, or desktop with multiple video outputs), many times when it resumes, it resumes to an unused video output, rather than the primary monitor.

2) When "Resuming Windows", it takes 2 to 3 times longer to resume (3-4 minutes), than it does to just shut the PC down then start it back up when you need to use it again (average 70-72 seconds).

I started using Windows 7 RC today, I was mainly worried about my software running on it, (Which it does, very well thankfully).

It was a pleasant surprise, it installed onto a clean drive very quickly, it is not cluttered like Vista, in fact despite the flashy interface, it feels like running XP as it should be and looks like Vista should have. It recognized all the hardware with no difficulty except the cable modem but it accpeted the old drivers with no problem.

I took to windows 7 RC really quickly and think it is the best you have come up with to date. If the final version is like this, it will probably end up like XP and Windows 98 did, the version of windows everyone wants to keep using.

This feature is especially helpful to handicapped individuals who do not have the dexterity needed to press the mouse keys in the normal fashion. Presently, programs like AutoHotKey are required to achieve the needed functionality with Window XP.

shutting down the PC after a specified time period, then when you turn it back it, it goes into "Resuming Windows". I prefer this setup because it also allows me to boot into the primary OS (Ubuntu) and do what I need to, and even after restarting, W7 still goes into "Resuming Windows".

When resuming from sleep/hibernation, any computer with more than 1 video output option (such as a laptop with external monitor port, or desktop with multiple video outputs), many times when it resumes, it resumes to an unused video output, rather than the primary monitor.

it installed onto a clean drive very quickly, it is not cluttered like Vista, in fact despite the flashy interface, it feels like running XP as it should be and looks like Vista should have. It recognized all the hardware with no difficulty except the cable modem but it accpeted the old drivers with no problem.

This feature is especially helpful to handicapped individuals who do not have the dexterity needed to press the mouse keys in the normal fashion. Presently, programs like AutoHotKey are required to achieve the needed functionality with Window XP.

Since acquiring a new PC with Windows 7 installed, the UI preferences tool on my Photoshop CS4 will not work and the text and icons remain uncomfortably small. Is this connected to the subject of this blog?

As SoCalJim said, do what you enjoy….i’m 2nd year electronic engineering student, i enjoyed electronics when i was so young and i loved it…now i’m doing very good in the major courses…and see, i took a mechanics course and i got D..also electronics eng. have much jobs and it’s very easy to find one, it’s the basis of technology and its development! ..so do what you enjoy!

Windows 7 is almost perfect for me. You are doing a really good job with this system.

But, before the RTM, can you please, just tweak a few points in Windows Explorer?

1) In windows xp, the status bar showed the left space of the current drive/partition, and the size of the files in the current folder. Now, it doesn´t show anymore, and I (among others) miss this feature a lot.

2) If we select more than 15 files in Windows Explorer, the Details Pane stop showing the sizes and info. We have to click the "Show more details" to it be visible. Please, remove this behaviour, or give us a option (even if registry option) to disable it. XP used to give me this information in less than a millisecond, and with a decade ago hardware.

A recent article I read on OSNews states that UAC is flawed in protecting you on the default setting because it allows Notepad and Calculator not to be protected by UAC. It’s a proof of concept code that would allow UAC to be turned off because of these two applications would bypass UAC. All I ask is that MS Developers to please look into this.

Let’s face it. We are constantly nagging about Windows here Windows there. About the problems we might get. But the bottom line is, that Windows are the best, most easy to use and most represented OS in the world. Ok, there are some problems, but problems can occure in any software.

I installed it onto a clean drive really quickly and it is not cluttered like Vista, in fact despite the flashy interface, it feels like running XP as it should be and looks very much like Vista should have. It recognized all the hardware I had with no difficulty except the modem but it accepted the old drivers with no problem.